Mike Milinkovich's blog

The news this morning that JetBrains is switching to a subscription-only model is a perfect example of why and how trusting a proprietary tools vendor leaves you and your business exposed to the whims of their profit margins. Make no mistake: this is motivated by what’s good for their business, not what is good for the developer community. Even if JetBrains backpedals on this decision, it is a lesson worth learning.

Today, we are significantly lowering the barriers for companies and individuals to actively invest in the ongoing development of the Eclipse platform. Eclipse has an amazing community of individuals and companies that invest significant amount of resources in the development of Eclipse open source projects. We also have a huge community of users that benefit from Eclipse technology. They use Eclipse tools and technology to build their software products and applications.

Several weeks ago, the Git community announced a new 2.2.1 release which fixed a serious security vulnerability. You can read more here and here. The Eclipse JGit project had their fix available the day that the vulnerability was announced.

Last week, AUDI, BMW and Daimler announced they are joining forces to form the Eclipse openMDM Working Group to create a new open source community to develop and distribute tools for managing automotive test data. These leading automotive OEMs will be joined in the group by Canoo Engineering AG, GIGATRONIK GmbH, HighQSoft GmbH, Peak Solution GmbH, and science + computing ag.

I am pleased to announce that the dates and venue for EclipseCon North America 2015 have been selected. We are returning to the Hyatt Regency Burlingame, the site of our 2014 event, the week of March 9-12, 2015. It’s great to be returning to the Bay Area once again.

It is very hard to put your mind back to an event in the past. I don’t mean simply remembering the event; that’s easy. What is hard is to recall what the environment was really like at the time, without the context of all of the subsequent history.

The Eclipse Foundation is going to start allowing its projects to host their mainline development on third party forges such as GitHub, and (eventually) Bitbucket. This means that an Eclipse project will be able to leverage the great development tools provided by those vendors. The first project that we are going to work with on this is Vert.x, which has been hosted on GitHub since its inception. Our intent is to start small, and continually improve this program and our support of it.